Charles Osborne: The Man Who Hiccuped for 68 Years and Set a Guinness World Record
- Sep 27, 2022
- 6 min read
"I'd give everything I got in the world if I could get rid of them. I don't know what it would be like not to have them. I get so sore jerking all the time."
Most people's hiccups are gone within a few minutes. Charles Osborne's lasted 68 years. From 13 June 1922 to June 1990, the Iowa farmer hiccuped continuously, racking up an estimated 430 million involuntary spasms before his body finally, inexplicably, stopped. No doctor ever cured him. No remedy ever worked for long. And yet Osborne married twice, raised eight children, held down a job, and by most accounts remained cheerful company right up until the end.
His case holds the Guinness World Record for the longest continuous attack of hiccups ever documented, and it remains one of the strangest stories in medical history.
A 350-Pound Hog and a Very Bad Day in Nebraska
The hiccups started with a fall. On 13 June 1922, Osborne was working on a farm near Union, Nebraska, preparing to butcher a hog. He was 29 years old. In his own words, as he later told People magazine in 1982: "I was hanging a 350-pound hog for butchering. I picked it up and then I fell down. I felt nothing, but the doctor said later that I busted a blood vessel the size of a pin in my brain."
The hiccups began almost immediately and didn't stop. Not that day, not that week, not that year. Not for nearly seven decades.
Osborne lived in Anthon, Iowa, a small town in Woodbury County, where locals grew accustomed to his unusual presence. Those who knew him remember a jovial man who sat on a bench at a street corner, greeted acquaintances with "What the hell's going on?" and rarely brought up his condition unprompted. He sold farm machinery for a living and auctioned livestock. He wasn't a man who wallowed.
What Was Actually Happening in His Brain
In the 1980s, a physician named Dr Terence Anthoney examined Osborne and offered the most detailed explanation anyone had managed. His conclusion was that the fall had destroyed a tiny area in the brain stem responsible for suppressing the hiccup reflex. Without that inhibitory mechanism, Osborne's diaphragm was left in a permanent state of involuntary spasm, firing 20 to 40 times per minute with no off switch.
More recent analysis from neurosurgeon Dr Ali Seifi (the creator of HiccAway) has suggested an alternative: that the fall may have caused a rib injury damaging the diaphragm directly, or that Osborne may have suffered a small stroke. As neurologist Dr Diana Greene-Chandos has noted, prolonged hiccups that come on suddenly can be a sign of stroke, particularly when paired with chest pain and dizziness. The two theories aren't mutually exclusive, and the exact cause was never definitively confirmed. For a deeper look at how brain injuries can produce extraordinary effects, the story of Dr Harvey Cushing, the neurosurgeon who transformed our understanding of the brain in the early 20th century, is worth a read.
What's clear is that in the early years, Osborne was hiccuping around 40 times a minute. That rate eventually slowed to about 20 per minute in later life. At those frequencies, over 68 years, the 430 million total estimate isn't an exaggeration. It's arithmetic.
To put the condition in some context: intractable hiccups, defined as bouts lasting more than a month, affect roughly 1 in 100,000 people. Around 5,000 people are hospitalised for persistent hiccups every year in the United States alone. Osborne's case dwarfs them all. In the 2000s, Chris Sands of Lincolnshire, England, made headlines after hiccupping for around three years before doctors discovered a brain tumour was the cause. Even that pales next to 68 years.
Learning to Live With It
Osborne adapted. He developed a breathing technique that allowed him to suppress the audible "hic" by inhaling between spasms, heaving his chest in a controlled rhythm that muffled the sound. People nearby often couldn't hear the hiccups at all. "He'd flex his chest three or four times every minute," recalled Kevern Koskovich, an Anthon resident who knew one of Osborne's sons. "You could tell he was hiccupping, but he wouldn't make any noise. He heaved, that's the best way to describe it."
Food became a particular challenge. From the early 1970s, Osborne had to put all his meals through a blender. He told People magazine in 1982: "I've worn out two Osterizers." His typical lunch was blended chicken, dressing, broth and milk, followed by several beers. Despite the dietary restrictions, he managed to keep his weight stable throughout his life.
One small mercy: the hiccups stopped when he slept. The moment he woke, they returned. But those hours of silence each night were apparently enough to keep him going. As one physician noted, the insomnia that comes with chronic hiccups can trigger depression and anxiety on top of everything else. That Osborne remained so consistently good-humoured is, in some ways, the most remarkable part of the whole story.
He married twice and fathered eight children. He kept working. He maintained friendships. By almost any measure, he refused to let his condition define what his life amounted to.
Everything They Tried
Over the decades, Osborne consulted doctors across the country. None found a lasting cure. Remedies ranged from the sensible to the experimental to the outright desperate.
One friend decided that a sudden shock might do the trick and fired a shotgun behind Osborne without warning. Osborne's verdict: "It scared me some, but it didn't scare the hiccups out of me."
He tried experimental hormone therapy. He tried various breathing and relaxation techniques. He drew the line at a surgical procedure that doctors warned might permanently impair his breathing, deciding that trading one problem for another wasn't much of a deal.
The closest anyone came to a cure was at the Mayo Clinic, where a doctor placed him on a controlled combination of carbon monoxide and oxygen. The hiccups stopped. The treatment was immediately abandoned: Osborne could not survive breathing poisonous gas as a long-term solution. It remains one of the more grimly comedic moments in the whole story.
By 1978, after 56 years of it, Osborne told the Associated Press: "I'd give everything I got in the world if I could get rid of them. I don't know what it would be like not to have them. I get so sore jerking all the time."
Fame, Johnny Carson, and the Guinness Book
It was around the time of that 1978 interview that national media attention began to build in earnest. He was listed in Guinness World Records. In 1980, he appeared on the TV show That's Incredible!. In 1983, he sat across from Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show, hiccuping through the interview with the same quiet good humour he brought to everything else. It was actually his second brush with national fame: back in 1936, fourteen years into his streak, he had appeared on Robert Ripley's Believe It or Not radio show in New York.
The Guinness listing and TV appearances brought an influx of letters from viewers offering home remedies. None worked. But Osborne seemed to take it all in his stride, never playing the martyr, never inviting pity. Columnist Bob Davis wrote in the Sioux City Journal in 1984: "Charles Osborne has not only survived; he has thrived."
His story fits a particular kind of history that tends to stick: the person who faces something absurd with dignity and keeps going anyway. For other examples of lives lived at the extreme end of the ordinary, the history of Britain's greatest eccentrics covers characters who might give Osborne a run for his money.
The Day They Stopped
In June 1990, with no warning and no explanation, the hiccups stopped. Osborne was 96 years old. He'd been hiccuping for 68 years. And then he wasn't.
No doctor could explain why they ended any more than they'd been able to explain why they started. Osborne himself apparently greeted the silence with characteristic understatement. He lived for another year without them, long enough to know what it felt like not to hiccup, something most people take entirely for granted.
Charles Osborne died in May 1991, aged 97, from complications related to ulcers. The Guinness record stands. Nobody has come close.
It's a story that sits in roughly the same category as King Adolf Frederick of Sweden, who reportedly ate himself to death, or Al Capone, whose syphilis-ravaged brain left him with the mental capacity of a 12-year-old by the end of his life: the human body doing something so extreme and so strange that it almost seems made up. Except it isn't.
Sources
1. Smithsonian Magazine. "The Curious Case of Charles Osborne, Who Hiccupped for 68 Years Straight." https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/the-curious-case-of-charles-osborne-who-hiccuped-for-68-years-straight-180980232/
2. People magazine. "A Cure for Hiccups? Retired Farmer Charles Osborne Isn't Holding His Breath." 1982.
3. Guinness World Records. "Longest attack of hiccups." https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/67619-longest-attack-of-hiccoughs
4. Little Village Magazine. "Lifting a heavy hog led to 68 years of hiccups for one long-suffering Iowan." https://littlevillagemag.com/peak-iowa-longest-hiccups/
5. Associated Press interview with Charles Osborne, 1978, via Newspapers.com.
6. Sioux City Journal. Bob Davis column, 1984, via Newspapers.com.
